The Symposia, 1933 — 2003

1992: The Cell Surface, Vol. LVII

Organizer: Bruce Stillman

John Donne wrote, in one of his great Elegies, “No man is
an island, entire of itself”. Nor, for that matter is a
cell. All cells have to communicate with their surroundings, whether
they are unicellular organisms in an aqueous medium or packed
together in the tissues of a multicellular organism. These communications
between what is inside the cell and what is outside are mediated
by the cell membrane and its associated molecules, called collectively
the “cell surface”.

The cell surface had figured prominently in the early years of
the Symposia. The meetings on Surface Phenomena (1933), Excitation
Phenomena (1936) and Permeability and the Nature of Cell Membranes
(1940) were very much in the line of the contemporary interest
in biophysical analysis, and treated the cell membrane essentially
as an inert wrapper around the cell. There was no knowledge or
suspicion that the membrane was more than the lipid bilayer proposed
by Davson and Danielli. Participants in the earlier meetings would
have been astounded by the range of phenomena that by 1992 could
be subsumed by the phrase “The Cell Surface”.

The Symposium reflected this remarkable diversity of phenomena,
as Mel Simon made clear in his summary: “The Cell Surface
Regulates Information Flow, Material Transport and Cell Identity”.
The most remarkable change wrought by 50 years of research is
that the cell surface became regarded as a complex structure,

pierced by channels, bristling with receptors that span the membrane,
coated by all manner of extracellular molecules, and linked to
the cytoskeleton within the cell. Simon illustrated this with
a figure representing the cell surface as imagined in 1940, 1972
and 1992. Furthermore, the membrane is no longer a passive mediator
between the interior of the cell and its environment; it is dynamic,
pores forming to take up or secrete molecules, and adhesion molecules
directing cell interactions. And the influence of the membrane
is felt in diverse systems–there were sessions covering
the role of the cell surface in development, immunology and neurobiology,
as well as in more “classical” cell biology topics.

This was the last Symposium attended by Barbara McClintock. Her
first Symposium had been Genes and Chromosomes: Structure and
Organization in 1941, and she had been in residence at the Laboratory
since 1942.